If we were Venezuelan we would vote for Chavez!

Monday 20 November 2006

Venezuela is going to the polls again on December 3. For the twelfth time in a row, the Venezuelan people face the challenge of defeating their country’s right wing, which acts as the electoral arm of imperialism and is trying to destabilise the process underway. In spite of the maintenance of a state structure based on bourgeois democracy, Hugo Chavez continues to represent a decisive factor for the triumph of the revolutionary process.

Manuel Rosales, governor of Zulia, is the candidate of a right obsessed by destroying everything that the revolutionary process has achieved since 1998. For this right-wing, the democratic conquests that the Venezuelan people has obtained through its fight - defeating the coup d’etat of 2002, the bosses’ lockout in winter 2002-03, the multiple attempts at armed and economic destabilization - would immediately have to be swept away to return to a situation in which the State would be strictly at the service of the possessing classes.

The positions taken by the Venezuelan government, their line of opposition without concessions to the government of the United States, their repeated opposition to imperialist wars, the withdrawal of the Venezuelan ambassador to Israel in protest at the war in Lebanon, the denunciation of the armed intervention in Haiti, the unreserved condemnation of the policy of Tony Blair towards the Middle East, the open support for the Latin American left, the diplomatic activism unfolding in Africa, have made of Chávez one of the most outstanding figures of the anti-imperialist struggle at a world-wide level, in spite of the limits and contradictions of his government’s policies.

A big victory for Chávez and the Venezuelan people will act as a call to struggle across the Latin American continent and will constitute a new reason for hope for the working class and the oppressed peoples of
the entire world. We are sure that on December 3 the Venezuelan people will celebrate a new victory that will allow it to continue constructing a freer and more just society, and to deepen the revolutionary process. It is for that reason that we reaffirm: IF WE WERE VENEZUELAN, WE WOULD VOTE FOR HUGO CHÁVEZ ON DECEMBER 3.